Debian DSA-3105-1 : heirloom-mailx - security update

high Nessus Plugin ID 80058

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Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security-related update.

Description

Two security vulnerabilities were discovered in Heirloom mailx, an implementation of the 'mail' command :

- CVE-2004-2771 mailx interprets shell meta-characters in certain email addresses.

- CVE-2014-7844 An unexpected feature of mailx treats syntactically valid email addresses as shell commands to execute.

Shell command execution can be re-enabled using the 'expandaddr'option.

Note that this security update does not remove all mailx facilities for command execution, though. Scripts which send mail to addresses obtained from an untrusted source (such as a web form) should use the-- separator before the email addresses (which was fixed to work properly in this update), or they should be changed to invokemail -t or sendmail -i -t instead, passing the recipient addresses as part of the mail header.

Solution

Upgrade the heirloom-mailx packages.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 12.5-2+deb7u1.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 80058

File Name: debian_DSA-3105.nasl

Version: 1.10

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Debian Local Security Checks

Published: 12/17/2014

Updated: 1/11/2021

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.7

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 5.5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 6.8

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:heirloom-mailx, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:7.0

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 12/16/2014

Vulnerability Publication Date: 12/24/2014

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2004-2771, CVE-2014-7844

DSA: 3105

Detections

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